From the moment the Need For Speed film was announced up until the moment I was sitting in the theater and this started I had every belief in the world that this film would be horrible. Usually games based off video games are horrible and taking the Need For Speed name which has no story spelled disaster but to my surprise this film turned out quite a lot better than expected.

The story follows Tobey Marshall who is a renowned racer in his town with a body shop who takes the offer up for a street race with a large sum of money on the line from someone he isn’t too fond of. Though when a friend joins the race and and Tobey’s rival Dino Brewster pulls a move resulting in the friends death, Tobey then has to face the consequence as Dino covers his tracks and Tobey does the time in prison for it. Out of prison Tobey is dead set on going cross country and attempting to join a secretive race to go after Dino and make him pay for the death of his friend.

Plot wise they do enough to set the film up and keep it going. Clearly a strong intricate story was never intended. At least the story does cover up most points and only leaves a few questions unanswered (mostly relating to the amount of insanity that happens). I can say however that I think the Need For Speed name was just placed on this as a cash grab. This could of been titled anything else and still been your action / racer that is popular again at the moment.

Need For Speed (2014)

Need For Speed runs as a Fast And Furious junior of sorts. Throughout the film we do get a few quite over the top races, thrown in with some extremely unrealistic moments. The races them self do the job usually. At times they sometimes lack the feel of speed that you expect. Quick enough the film decides that throwing impossible scenarios into the mixture will do them well including mountain side racing shootouts and one of the most over the top cop chases that i can remember in recent time. None of the scenes ever feel up the same pedigree that Fast and Furious are at but I never found myself bored watching this either and was always entertained by it.

One of the biggest stregths the film has is the cast however. The group of friends including Aaron Paul, Imogen Poots, Scott Mescudi, Rami Malek, and Ramon Rodriguez work great together. They all have good on screen chemistry and really feel like a close knit group of friends. Joke wise as well they lead to some entertaining snips and conversations between them all. Dominic Cooper is okay the villain. At times I found him hard to believe. I viewed him almost as the rich high profile guy that just got out of a horrible situation. Plus his acting seemed to differentiate throughout the movie.

Overall Need For Speed surprised me. It turned out to be a decently funny yet completely mindless action racer. Worth a watch for sure.